Tighter European data legislation could threaten international health insurer business models, the industry has been warned.
As a result, insurers face having to gain increased access to data provided by clients and medical records and may end-up adopting a more pooled risk approach.
This is according to Duncan Minty, business ethics consultant at Duncan Minty Consulting, who addressed delegates on the second morning of Health & Protection’s second annual IPMI Summit in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
Minty explained EU legislation finalised last month contains an explicit ban on the use of secondary health data for insurance purposes.
Such secondary data is characterised as being collected by someone else for some other purpose, which is then reused in another context, as opposed to primary data which is provided directly from the end customer.
But Minty added the EU rules also extend to group data as well as individual personal data.
And when asked about how insurers will respond to such a hardening of attitudes from regulators which could result in them losing the algorithms they use, Minty revealed some insurers were still understanding these changes.
“I think they will try for more primary data,” Minty told delegates.
“They will push for more access to medical records. They may want group stuff because they know that that they want a bit more of the pooling effect so they reduce their exposure that way.”